Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Calcutta, USA by Paul Jacob

Last week, talking to David Corn of Mother Jones (and no doubt several viewers from across the country), Matthews crystallized the political debate raging in America today:

The problem is that we don’t think in terms of what would the country be like if we didn’t have Medicare for our parents as they get very old — in their eighties, for example, when they’re still alive, and they need health care, a lot of it. And they don’t have any source of income. They’re not working every morning. They’re not making a paycheck. What would it be like in this country? Calcutta? Poor people all over the place? Old people lying in the streets? I mean, we don’t think about what it would be if we didn’t have health care, if we didn’t have Social Security for people at the age of 65, if we didn’t have unemployment compensation, if we didn’t have a progressive income tax. There’s a lot of things we don’t think about. And the right-wing just pounds and pounds away at this idealistic notion of a cowboy country, everybody self-reliant. I think the progressives, for all their power on the blogosphere, have not done a positive case for the advantages of some kind of a social state.

So let’s think in precisely the terms Matthews suggests. Before Medicare was instituted, were elderly folks “lying in the streets?” Were there “poor people all over the place?”

Simple answer? “No.”If it weren’t for the progressive tax system [which should be replaced by a national sales tax] and the huge social welfare system, the economy would be much stronger and more people would be able to take care of themselves and their own.

The Left knows this and it terrifies them. That is why they advocate things that cripple the economy and make people more dependent upon the government. That is why they are against anything that would empower the general population whom they openly despise.

For the Left, power is an end in itself. They lust for a medieval social structure in which a tiny elite lords over an impoverished, ignorant and disenfranchised mass of serfs. The only difference is leadership would be chosen by political pull rather than birth.